Zero Tolerance Nonsense

I've been super-lax in blogging duties for, well, months, but I couldn't pass up these stories--two in the same week. I have a soft spot for ridiculous school policies.

All over the news earlier this week was the story of six-year-old Delaware boy who, excited about joining the Cub Scouts, brought his new folding knife-fork-spoon camping tool to school.  Under the school district's zero-tolerance policy, the boy was suspended and reassigned to a reform school for 45 days.

Also this week is the story of the seventeen-year-old  Troy, NY Eagle Scout and Army National Guard soldier ( he enlisted while still in high school), who was suspended from school for having a two-inch pocket knife in . . .wait for it . . . the trunk of his car, which was parked on school property.  Again, zero tolerance run amok.

Utterly ridiculous.  Not because schools shouldn't have rules prohibiting potentially dangerous implements in school. (I stop short of calling them "weapons", as the school policies seem to imagine them, because in both cases they were not intended to be, or used as, such.) It seems reasonable enough that, in general, students should not have sharp metal things in school without supervision.  The travesty of zero tolerance policies is that the right and responsibility to exercise good judgment is taken away from teachers and building-level administrators.  It's as though school boards (and the people who vote their members into office) simply don't trust the people they hire to teach and look after children to use common sense.